Mann is an Island

by Mark SteynSeptember 30, 2014

https://www.steynonline.com/6582/mann-is-an-island

Thank you for your continuing forbearance while I attend to some sad personal matters. On a lighter note, the Government of the Australian Capital Territory has been handing out its taxpayer-funded arts grants:

Aspen Island Theatre Company: $18,793 to assist with costs of the creative development of a new theatre work, 'Kill Climate Deniers'.

I shall be on stage myself in Australia in a few months' time. Perhaps the Government of the Australian Capital Territory could just eliminate the middle man and give me $18,793 to kill myself.

~The ACT might more usefully hand out awards of $18,793 to respectable persons willing to defend in public Michael E Mann. The Nobel Fauxreate and the world's most un-exonerated man has been reduced to giving interviews to weird creepy fringe obsessives like Greg Laden on Puffball FM ...whoops, sorry, I mean "Minnesota Atheist Talk Radio". Why an atheist radio station would want to interview the prophet of a millenarial cult like Mannatollah Mike is a mystery to me, but you can find out live this Sunday at 9am Central.

Meanwhile, Dr Mann's other remaining defender, Eli Rabett, has purchased an image of a zombie chowing down on a hockey stick that he feels represents the "metastasizing" hockey wars, and is offering it as a T-shirt design. I don't feel it's quite as stylish as our own stick-chomping design above, which is available as both a gentleman's T-shirt and lady's T-shirt, and is the must-wear Mann vs Steyn trial merchandise if you're thinking of swinging by the District of Columbia courthouse when I go mano a Manno. On the other hand, if you prefer to wear barristerial robes and a horsehair wig in court, don't miss our Steyn vs the Stick mugs and mousepads. Proceeds go to prop up my pushback against Mann's Clime Syndicate.

Notwithstanding recent setbacks for their chap, Rabett & Co are staying chipper. Following the assertion that "Mann's defenders are becoming scarce", one commenter responds:

~On Saturday Dr Mann took part in a panel to discuss the "climate wars" in New York. The moderator, Jodi Dean, introduced Mann as a "Nobel Peace Prize winner". He did not correct her. Mann was forced to withdraw his original defamation complaint against me after falsely claiming to be a Nobel Laureate and submit an amended complaint that procedurally bollocksed up his own lawsuit to an extent from which it has yet to recover. The Nobel Institute itself has told Mann to knock it off with the "Nobel Prize winner stuff", as has the IPCC. There's something rather pitiful about the way he can't let go of this purloined bauble.

(Incidentally, Mann won't debate me or Steve McIntyre or Judith Curry, but he's happy to appear with Ms Dean, who thinks the hammer and sickle is not a symbol of mass murder but a fashion accessory.) [UPDATE: My mistake. Jodi Dean is deadly serious about "the Communist ideal". It's not just a fashion pose.]

By (perhaps inadvertently) drawing attention to Mann's 2005 "Preisendorfer" calculation, ATTP has raised an issue that is highly relevant to Steyn's allegations of fraud and which ought to be minutely examined by Steyn and others. Indeed, this is one of the issues on which discovery might turn up something interesting.

Prior to our 2004 submission to Nature, there wasn't a shred of evidence that Mann had done a "Preisendorfer" calculation for tree ring networks, though there was evidence that he done such a calculation on temperature networks. In 2005, Mann produced source code showing the calculation on temperature networks, but produced no such code for tree ring networks, even in response to a request from a House Committee. My own present surmise is that Mann didn't use a "Preisendorfer" calculation for tree ring networks in MBH98, but was driven to this calculation in order to mitigate problems arising in 2004 from our exposure of Mann's defective principal components method. Supporting this surmise is the impossibility of reproducing the actual pattern of retained PCs in MBH98 using the "Preisendorfer" calculation first attested in 2004. I believe that Mann was scrambling in 2004 to figure out some way of trying to mitigate his erroneous PC method and that his "Preisendorfer" calculation for tree rings was first used in 2004, not 1998.

If I were in Steyn's shoes, I would require meticulous disclosure of the original calculations, which are totally undocumented.I would also be surprised if such discovery requests yields documents showing that Mann actually used the Preisendorfer Rule for PC retention in tree ring networks in MBH98.

Steve McIntyre is being characteristically understated here. Mann is like a mom who buckles her kid into the car seat after she's crashed the vehicle.